Exceedingly Mundane

Well, it looks like the remainder of our holiday weekend will be a rain-out. Or so they are saying. We drove most of the way back from New Orleans yesterday in the rain, and pulled up at home to find everything soaked, so we knew we had gotten a good rain.

Dad stopped by on his way home from Indianola to Hattiesburg yesterday afternoon after we got in, and visited with us for a few minutes. Then, after he left, we ran out to Blockbuster to rent a movie (I had one more free rental coupon good for the month of May), and then stopped by Kroger to pick up hotdogs and buns to grill out today. It rained again shortly after we got back home, and then I think it might have rained more during the night. It’s looking like more rain later today, as they are predicting 80% chance of rain for today, tonight and tomorrow. Tim had wanted to get out and work in the yard, cut the grass, and work on my back flower bed. But everything looks like a mud slide out there, so I think that is definitely out.

So far, we’re just hanging out inside, which is ok-fine by me. 🙂 I did the trivia on Hambones.org this morning, and am trying to catch up on some emails and blog surfing. Maybe we’ll watch more movies this afternoon. Tim watched “Blade Trinity” last night, but I finished reading another book and watched “Titanic” on TV, instead of watching the vampire stuff with him. I have several book and movie reviews that I need to add to Hambones later on, hopefully today or tomorrow.

Hope everyone has a great Memorial Day!

We got back from New Orleans today. Nice long weekend, and it was fun. We did basically what I blogged about before we left (you can read all about it here). Except we didn’t make it on the streetcar to tour the Garden District. We ate at Landry’s (stuffed shrimp for me, shrimp fettucine for Tim), and also at House of Blues (shrimp po-boy for me, ribs, sweet potatoes and turnip greens for Tim, then we split the chocolate walnut brownie with ice cream for dessert!). We walked down to the original Cafe Du Monde on Saturday morning and found the line to get in was about a block long, so we went to the Riverwalk and ate at the Cafe du Monde there. Inside a shopping mall, so we didn’t have the ambience, but had the same food/drink and air conditioning and a view of the river to boot! I discovered that even though I can drink our coffee at home, I can still barely get down Cafe du Monde’s original cafe au lait, unless it has a LOT of sugar added to it! Tim drank their regular black coffee, in spite of the guy warning him “our coffee is VERY strong sir”, he got a large and downed every last drop of it. It looked like tar!

We spent all day Saturday at the D-Day museum (well, between 5 and 6 hours), and finished what we had not seen a couple of summers ago. We walked along the Riverwalk towards dusk and watched a bunch of boats coming up the river. All in all, a really nice trip. We had thought we might stick around and do something today (Sunday), but it had rained early that morning and was very grey and overcast, and we were ready to get home. After checking out, we proceeded to wait nearly 1 1/2 hours for our car to be brought around from the valet service. Well, technically, we called ahead from the room about 20-30 minutes before we went down. Then, we sat in the lobby for 55 minutes, waiting on our car. Long story. Otherwise, we really liked the hotel. Great ambience and a terrific room. No view. We were on the first floor and our window view was an alley with cars and lots of dumpsters. But it was right in the middle of things, and still very quiet and peaceful at night and we really enjoyed it.

Hope everyone else had a great weekend too!

I think one of the best things about going on a vacation, or even a long weekend like we are doing this Memorial Day weekend, is getting to go shopping and buy some new things! 😀 Nothing like an excuse to buy new clothes!

I headed out to Lakeland Drive this afternoon, and stopped first at LinensNThings to get my new Yankee Candle I’ve been wanting so desperately. I had a coupon, so I splurged and got a Juicy Cherry housewarmer candle for my kitchen. It smells soooo good. I almost got a honeydew melon instead, on Gail’s advice. She bought one earlier and it really does smell good, really fresh and clean. That one may be next! I almost caved and bought another one, they were featuring the Lemon Zest ones on special, and I nearly splurged, but was good. Which was a good thing, because I left and drove to Kohl’s. Where I proceeded to buy a whole lot more than the one or two pairs of shorts I went to buy. 😆

Click the -More- link if you want to see some of the stuff I came home with! 🙂

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Well, I have a lot to blog about and not much time to sit down and blog about it. I would like to blab about the TV shows last night – the American Idol finale, the Lost 2 hour season finale and the Alias finale. Maybe later.

We got up early and went walking this morning. Tim is going to take off Friday and wants to go to New Orleans this weekend. So, we spent most of the morning looking online for hotels. We’re going to try a new one this time – the St James down in the Quarter. We’ve not stayed here before, so it will be a learning experience. We’ve stayed at the Wyndham and Hyatt before and had great stays, so hopefully this one will be as nice.

We’re going to go back to the D-Day Museum and finish going through it. We went two summers ago and didn’t see it all, but enjoyed the museum immensely. We’ll probably take in a movie at the IMAX, there is a new African safari one starting this weekend. Also, I’ve been wanting to take the St Charles streetcar down through the Garden District and we’ve not done that yet, so hopefully this trip. I know Tim wants to go back to House of Blues and eat, he loved it there when we went last time (we won’t go for the bands or music, probably go for lunch). I know that eating out in New Orleans won’t be a problem. Plenty of good places to eat. 🙂

Oh, and we’ll definitely hit Cafe du Monde at least one time, maybe more. I have only learned to “tolerate” coffee in the last year or so, since we went on vacation last summer to San Antonio. The last time we went to New Orleans, I didn’t drink coffee, couldn’t stand the taste of it, and although we went to Cafe du Monde, I ended up getting milk or water with my beignet. Not this time! 😀

We are leaving Friday morning and coming back Sunday night. I have to head out this afternoon and run some errands, then get back and do laundry before we go.

Hope you all have a great Memorial Day weekend. I will try to check in Sunday night when we get back. 😀

I always like this one, good questions! From this site:

Questions For May 24th
Fruits And Veggies!

1. What’s Your Favorite Veggie?: Probably broccoli. OOH, or mushrooms! 😀
2. Do You Have A Favorite Salad Dressing?: Honey Mustard
3. Strawberries /or/ Cherries?: Both!
4. Brown Pears /or/ Green Pears?: Green Pears
5. Celery With Cream Cheese /or/ Peanut Butter?: Neither. BLECH. I hate celery. I will eat cream cheese on anything though, and peanut butter on most things, although I love to smear it on a banana! 🙂

Odds and Ends running through my head:

1. We got up and went walking, and then Tim came back and took a nap before going to work! He got called out last night (I will be so glad when he goes off-call on Friday for another two weeks), and had to get up in the wee hours of the morning

2. Guilty indulgence – listening to my MP3 of “Since U Been Gone” over and over 😀

3. Guilty indulgence #2 – I want to go eat either a Skinny Cow ice cream sandwich or a No Pudge Chocolate Swirl cone. But I’m trying to be good and not eat either one

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Well, this week is wrapping up all of our shows. A lot of them had their season finales last week, and the rest of them are this week. We watched the 2 hour finale of ’24’ on Monday night, and I’m left bitter, wondering why we have to wait till Jan 2006 to find out what happens to Jack, and if he’s coming back. We taped the season finale of 7th Heaven, but haven’t had time to watch it yet. Last night, it was the season finale of NCIS, and it was a jaw-dropper. They had previewed that one of the NCIS agents “would not survive”, but usually it’s just to lure you in, and we hoped it was a secondary character, and not one of the main agents. Nuh-huh, no way. They had a sniper shoot Kate between the eyes in the last couple of seconds of the show. I was rather upset. Then, we watched House, and while it was good, it wasn’t earth-shattering. I do love Sela Ward though, goes back to my days when I loved the show “Sisters”, and I’m happy to see that it looks like she will be back for at least a couple of episodes next season. Then, we watched our tape of American Idol, and both agreed that while we like both Bo and Carrie and would be happy for either of them to win, that a) neither one of them sang really well, nothing outstanding and b) the judges and probably America are predisposed to Bo to win, which is ok with us. However, being the “root for the underdog” kind of people we are, I felt compelled to vote for Carrie. I got in a few times, mostly after 10 PM.

Anyway, tonight is the last big hoorah. It’s the show I’ve been waiting for weeks for. The two hour finale of Lost. I absolutely cannot wait. I hope it’s all that they have built it up to be, and better, but I am afraid with all the hype, they can’t live up to it. Then, I think the Alias finale is on, and we will probably watch that. We’ll have to tape Idol and basically just watch the last 5 minutes to find out who won!

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I saw this at Big Orange Michael’s blog last week sometime. Since I’ve been in such a revved-up, high-level Star Wars mood since last week, I thought it was a good time to do this one! 😀

The movie meme game

1) Total number of films I own on DVD/video: Well, the DVD collection on Hambones shows 92 DVD’s. We also own some on video, although we’ve been slowly trying to dub those to DVD. That number reflects each of my trilogies as one (each of the 3 extended editions of Lord of the Rings, plus my original Star Wars trilogy).

2) The last film I bought: National Treasure

3) The last film I watched: The last one we watched at home was Taxi (rental) this past weekend, plus 2 Star Wars movies. The last movie we saw at the theatre was this past weekend, my beloved Star Wars episode 3 – Revenge of the Sith.

4) Five films that I watch a lot or that mean a lot to me (in no particular order):

All of the Lord of the Rings trilogies
All of my Star Wars movies
You’ve Got Mail
Notting Hill
Princess Bride

Let’s see… catching up from Monday late. Tim got home and we went walking and got our two miles in. We had supper and then watched the season finale of ’24’. I couldn’t believe it – now they have Jack in hiding, and we have to wait to see if they figure out a way to bring him back. And we don’t have to wait till September, darn, the preview says we have to wait till January. What’s up with that? We taped the season finale of 7th Heaven, but didn’t watch it. We worked on the PC and phones for a couple of hours after ’24’ went off.

Tim had stopped at CompUSA on the way home and got us a Vonage phone adaptor. We installed it last night and got our new service activated. We did the transfer paperwork to have our phone number transferred from BellSouth, but that’s going to take a while. Their website says a “minimum of 20 working days”, but I think it will be more like a month or two. We’ll see. We realized we didn’t have a free port on the router for the vonage adaptor, so Tim had to “rig” it temporarily, and will have to daisy chain our old router together with the current one, or else we’ll have to buy a bigger router. It’s always something! 🙂

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A day late… but still going to do it! 😀

The following all begin with ‘In your lifetime, have you….’

1. …ridden on a rollercoaster? Unfortunately, yes. Not willingly.
2. …performed (in any area of the arts) onstage? Nope
3. …planted a garden? Flowers, not a vegetable garden
4. …ever had to reformat your hard drive due to a virus/spyware? Nope
5. …written a book? A poem? A song? Nope
6. …sang karaoke? Not in front of anyone. I did lots of singing into an air microphone as a pre-teen though 😀
7. …been interviewed by a local tv station/newspaper? We were interviewed by the Hattiesburg American after Tim’s graduation, and had a one-line quote put on the front page the next day. We have that framed, in the study! 🙂
8. …witnessed a tornado/earthquake/hurricane first-hand? No, thank goodness
9. …participated in a photo scavenger hunt? No, have done other scavenger hunts, but never one with just photos
10. …traveled to another country? Not yet, but I will. It’s my lifelong dream to go to England, Scotland and Wales. France too, but not before the others.

Shanna sent out a few pictures earlier today of their new deck that Trent is building them. Grayson is sitting on the deck, eating a popsicle. The quintessential summer thing to me, to sit outside and eat snow cones, popsicles, ice cream bars, or anything cold on a hot summer day. He reminds me so much of Trent when he was younger, and I need to go dig out some pictures from then and scan them. In the mean time, I pulled this picture of my refrigerator – it has hung there for over 12 years now. We were all a lot younger then! 🙂 (The picture itself is probably 18-20 years old, but it’s been on my refrigerator so long, the edges are all curled up!)

P.S. The pictures from Shanna are on Hambones now, in the Photo Gallery. The ones of Grayson on the new deck are under Misc / Trent and Shanna’s House. There is also one of Ava Clair, and it’s in their album “Grayson and Ava Clair”, towards the bottom of the first page of the photo gallery. Enjoy!

Another one of those weekends where we are so busy working hard and having fun, that I didn’t ever stop to take a minute and blog about it. Saturday was work day, and Sunday afternoon we went to see Star Wars and run a bunch of errands. Click the -More- link if you want to read all the gory details! 🙂

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Well, our weekend was busy, busy, busy. But good, as always. I’ll post a recap tomorrow when I have more time! 🙂

Yesterday was Tim’s parents 38th anniversary, and they all came over to celebrate it with us! Terry and the kids came too, and we all went to Harbor Freight, then to Ryan’s to eat out. After we left Ryan’s, we headed towards Old Navy on Lakeland and proceeded to drive into a torrential thunderstorm. There were times that Zack and I couldn’t see the road, but Tim didn’t drive off into a ditch, so apparently he could see! Terry got the kids some new swimsuits, as he and Zack were headed to Philadelphia to Geyser Falls today. Brittany has a cheerleading clinic all day today! Anyway, we hope that Mitchell and Linda enjoyed their anniversary, since we really enjoyed spending it with them! 😀

Found this while blog surfing… go take it and see how you rate!

Click here for the Star Wars Quiz

I took it and scored 70. I only missed 2 questions – #9 and #14, although I do admit to guessing on one of the last ones, after having narrowed it down to 2 choices. My score of 70 puts me in the 61-85 range – “Be careful, you may be a Sith Lord.”